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Emergencies

If there is an emergency on campus call 01225 38 3999. Anywhere else, call 999. Keep calm and keep safe.

Mental Health Support

The University offers a large variety of support for mental health struggles. This document outlines the services you may want to refer someone to depending on how worried you are about them.

If a student seems in any kind of immediate danger, follow the supporting students in distress guide. Keep yourself safe.

1. General Support

If you feel like a student needs a bit of a cheer up, some advice or something to break them out of a bit of a torrid time, these services may be of help!

  • Director of Studies Team

    Academic guidance, as well as a great pillar of support. The DoS team has all the answers to potential academic questions, from guidance on suspensions to further signposting. They are useful for the academic side, but are not mental health professionals.

  • Nightline

    Helps with situations that span a variety of severities, running from 8PM to 8AM, 7 days a week during term time. They deal with things as small as students who have nothing on their mind to those who are highly distressed and need urgent assistance. It is a volunteer service run by students.

    • Nightline website
    • Nightline email, promising response within 48 hours during term time.
    • The Nightline phone number, 01225 38 3030, can be found on the back of any student’s library card.

  • Support Groups

    There are multiple support groups available for students going through hardship and feeling isolated but these are poorly advertised. If a student seems to be going through one of these situations, a gentle push in this direction may provide some company in times for which they do not want to be alone.

  • The Roper Centre

    The Roper Centre in 4 West now offers support every day of the year, from 9am to 5pm. They can provide advice and are very friendly and approachable. If you feel like a student would benefit from support, but they aren’t willing to seek it themselves, you can also go to the Roper Centre to see if there’s anything they can do. they won’t compel anyone to get help, but they can reach out and they can also support you as a Student Leader. Remember if there is a risk of immediate harm you should follow the supporting students in distress guide.

2. Longer Term Support

Sometimes students show signs of underlying problems that you feel may warrant some longer-term support, or at the very least a consultation about the topic, and sometimes a student will ask you for this directly. These are the services available to us as students and residents of Bath.

  • The Wellbeing Team

    The University’s wellbeing team offers short term counselling sessions after an initial consultation, usually 6 weekly sessions with the hope that these will be enough to help a student. The University has in-house consellors and is partnered with outside organisations as well. These include one that offers culturally-appropriate counselling targeted specifically at students from Black, Asian, and minoritized communities.

  • External Methods

    Honestly, it’s probably a better idea to point students to university-affiliated services first, but if that fails, Bath has multiple organisations that also offer support, though a lot of them require registration with a local GP.

    • BaNES IAPT (Bath and Northeast Somerset Increasing access to psychological therapies)

      A Bath-based service, similar to the University’s, this service often offers 6-week sessions of 1-on-1 counselling before deciding whether you may need more, but as it is an NHS, may have an annoyingly long waiting list. They focus on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

    • Bath Minds

      Another service that provides similar services to BaNES IAPT, though they are a slightly larger organisation and are a charity that offer more than just counselling, such as wellbeing groups centred around common hobbies like football.

      Link: Bath Minds website

    • Off the record

      A charity that also offers similar counselling services, as well as advocacy groups and LGBTQ+ support, this is sometimes a group that the university refers students to after wellbeing’s initial evaluation.

      Off the Record’s website

    • NHS

      The NHS is also a method for which to pursue counselling and long-term therapies, though the waitlist is long.

      NHS Mental Health

    Honestly, there are probably a lot more, but this just goes to show that there is support, though waitlists are a constant annoyance in all such services. The University has a list of services in the area with many specialised services, located in both Bath and Bristol.

3. Immediate Help

There are also services for which a student can get immediate advice and help, while this also includes Nightline, they only operate for certain hours of the day.

  • Be Well - Talk Now

    A phone line that the University has hired a third party to run (they specialise in providing mental health support for businesses and universities). They are open to both call and live chat 24/7 and offer both domestic and international service. They have multilingual advisors and the ability to refer cases that need more help to where they need to go. As they are available by phone, this is a service that could be very useful.

    • Phone in the UK: 0808 196 8046
    • Phone outside the UK: +44 3 307771499
    • Live chat is available

  • Campus Security

    If things have gotten bad, and practical advice is needed, for example if an ambulance is needed, a student is lost or an accident has occurred, campus security is a good place to call. They will be able to help an ambulance navigate campus better than any student; they are always useful in a pinch.

    • Emergency number: 01225 383999
    • General number: 01225 385349

  • 999/111

    999 and 111 are also an important resource to remember, if things are looking real bleak, 999 offer support in life threatening conditions while 111 offer support in situations of when you’re unsure who to call and how serious things are.

4. Other resources

While these are all important, there are other sources of support available to students that may be helpful to know about! For example:

Overall, there are so many resources you can point students towards. It is important to remember that as Student Leaders, you may be put in a position where you are asked to provide help. That’s fine, but it’s important not to get out of your depth! There are many professionals we can rely on to help our fellow students work through their problems, and our job on that front is to make sure students can get access to the help they need (even if we are sometimes those students as well)!

Financial Support

The financial support the university offers can mostly be split into advice and money. In general terms, they can offer 1-on-1 meetings about financing

Money Advice

There are a lot of resources available, which can be listed on the Money Advice page. However, it is very dense, so what follows is a breakdown and grouping of the advice. I’d recommend skimming the page anyway as it’s useful stuff beyond this summary.

Funding support

The University directs to the various devolved student finance websites:

Separate guidance for non-UK students is also given. They also link to support when opening a student bank account:

There is further guidance on opening a Shari’a compliant account for those whose religious beliefs go against the idea of paying or charging interest, such as Islam. The University also offers emergency funds, more of which can be found in the following section.

Monetary Aid

The university offers funding to students in two forms, short term loans and the hardship fund.

The short term loans can be applied to by students for up to 300 pounds, or 500 pounds if they have dependents. It is discretionary and usually not awarded during the last 2 months of the academic year. They are interest-free and usually due within 2 months, or when the next loan instalment is due, whichever is sooner, although a student can apply for longer through the money advice team.

The hardship fund is available to both home and international students, but does require students to have applied for the maximum amount of maintenance available to them. This means that effectively, if you’re a UK student you need to have applied to and achieved the max maintenance loan for your household income. They take about a month to make a decision and the idea is that they help with financial hardship, though for international students this must be considered unexpected, as they don’t help with tuition fees or similar. It’s a tricky process but the maximum award is 3500 pounds.

Budgeting

There is budgeting support available through the University:

Dignity and Respect

The University has a very wide range of options available for students who are being made to feel uncomfortable.

Mental health support

If someone is being made uncomfortable by others this can have a severe impact on their mental health. Read through the signposting steps in the mental health section before progressing.

Support and Report

Support and Report is a bit of a misnomer: there is no obligation to report anything officially, or to start a formal enquiry.

What to report

Anything that makes a member of the University uncomfortable can be reported on Support and Report. This includes incidents that occur off campus or online, or involve non-University people. Reports can be made anonymously, by bystanders, through a friend or directly by a student. Reports do not have to be about a specific incident; it could be a repeated pattern of behaviour, or microaggressions.

What happens next

Each report is handled individually. Making a report does not automatically start a misconduct inquiry. All reports are confidential and are not shared without the explicit permission of the student (except if there is an immediate threat).

Even after making a report through Support and Report, no pressure is applied to continue with any formal or non-formal interventions. The default action is to simply log the incident and take no further action.

Some narrow examples of outcomes could include, but are not limited to:

  • Log the incident and take no specific action (the information can be used to focus future preventative work)
  • Log the incident and get back in touch if it happens again (including with other students)
  • Log the incident and get back in touch after a certain amount of time
  • Referral to mental health support
  • Action within the academic department (the department is not told of the reason for changes, but this could include separation in group courseworks or lab groups)
  • Action with Student Living
  • Contact with external organisations and/or the police
  • Non-formal interviews
  • Imposing mandatory training on people
  • Triggering Student Discipline procedures

The key thing is that none of these will happen without the permission of the subject!

If the person who experienced the discomfort does not want to make a report, a committee member can do this, either on behalf of the person, or as a bystander. In the latter case, no action is taken, but options for action can be suggested to the committee member, who can pass this on to the subject.